The invention described herein was made in the course of work under a grant or award from the Department of Health, Education and Welfare.
A favorable prognosis for a cancer is dependent upon the early detection of malignant cells. B-cell neoplasms, such as lymphocytic leukemias, follicular lymphomas, and others, develop from aberrant cells which have chromosomal translocations. Karyologic analyses of neoplastic B-cells indicate that they carry chromosomal translocations characteristic of a particular neoplasm (See Erikson et al., Proc. Nat'l Acad. Sci. USA 80: 4822-4826 (1983), and Proc. Nat'l. Acad. Sci. USA 81: 4144-1448 (1984)). For example, a translocation between chromosomes 14 and 18 is characteristic of human follicular lymphomas (See Croce et al., Proc. Nat'l Acad. Sci. USA 80: 6922-6926 (1983), and Yuni et al., N. Engl. J. Med. 307: 1231-1236 (1982)).
Karyologic analysis of lymphocytes, however, is not an efficient technique for screening large numbers of individuals to detect chromosomal rearrangements of these B-cell neoplasms. There is, thus, a need for a facile test for the diagnosis of suspected B-cell neoplasms.